


heavenly father

by crappyfriday



Series: no good unless it grows [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Character Study, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-06 13:41:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15195986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crappyfriday/pseuds/crappyfriday
Summary: Billy thinks and he thinks and he looks in the mirror and he looks in his eyes and the person staring back isn't someone he recognizes and nothing makes sense anymore. And nothing has made sense for so long.





	heavenly father

**Author's Note:**

> A more in depth, companion piece to Delicate. I hope to expand on ideas there and really hammer out Billy's progression into a nice boy who handles his emotions better as well as show his and Steve's development in to lil boyfriends<3

Sometimes when Billy reacts or acts, it feels like a sort of out-of-body experience, and he’s watching this person who is _not_ him, but wears his skin and feels his emotions, do this entirely awful thing to someone and he can’t do anything to stop it from happening.

It’s about the fights, the way he talks, the way he holds himself in the halls at school and at parties, like he’s always concealing the person he _wants_ to be, but for some reason _isn’t._ It’s this bravado. Will they know he’s weak? Will they know he cries at night when everyone is asleep? Will they know his dad hits him? Will they figure it out? What happens when he stops acting top dog? Will they figure out he’s nothing more than a parasite?

He feels like a goddamn parasite.

His dad says it’s his fault. Billy was a horrible child: too dependent, too whiny, too this, too that. It made his mother want to leave. She couldn’t stand Billy’s voice, his annoying curiosity—she couldn’t handle his _gayness._  Billy wonders how she knew before he did.

Every time he kissed a boy, he wonders: _is this why my mother left me? Could she not love me when I’m like this?_

He remembers his father stayed.

Sometimes he wonders if his father would have gone if she hadn’t left first. It keeps him up at night. Billy will crawl under the bed, grab the tin box he shoved against the wall, and only with the light of his lighter on his nightstand, he’ll open the box and peer at the pictures it holds. One of him as a newborn baby in his crib, his father’s face next to the bed. Another of Billy several years older—six, he thinks—with his mother at the beach. She’s wearing a beautiful yellow sundress and her sunglasses are pushed back into her hair. Billy has a towel wrapped around his body, his hair wet and pushed back. There’s a smile so big planted on each of their faces.

And he wonders what was the last straw for her. She looked so happy here. And in the next picture, too: it’s him and her again. They’re laying on a blanket in a field of grass, just reading, but her arm is around his shoulders and he’s tucked into her body. Billy can’t see their faces, but he sees their same blonde curls.

The last picture is just of his mother. Sort of. Her hand takes up most of the frame—she was trying to hide herself. Billy remembers the moment it was taken. It was a Saturday afternoon and they were going out to dinner that night as a family. He was twelve. His mother had curlers in her hair and a big robe on. He thought she looked so pretty and he wanted a photo of it.

Billy had grabbed his polaroid camera and tried to take a picture of her. She laughed and laughed as she tried to shield her face, but in the end, Billy got a picture of her hand, her hair, and the corner of her beautiful smile. It’s his favourite photo. But he wonders how long after it was taken did she get the idea to leave. Or was she already thinking it?

He loved her so much and yet, his father said it was what made her leave. His mother left, his father stayed—what does that say? What does it mean?

The hand that hits him, the mouth that curses him constantly, the eyes that stare into his with looks of hate and disappointment and anger, they all belong to his father. But he stayed. And she left. And Billy doesn’t know what to think of this.

He loves his mother but she didn’t love him. At least, not in a way that would have made her stay. In some sort of twisted sense, Billy is glad she is gone. His father was and is a monster, and when Billy looks in the mirror, the sneer on his face matches his father’s. He doesn’t see his mom in his smile anymore. She had the most beautiful smile in the world—Billy would do anything to make her smile—and his looked just like hers. But now it’s calculated, it’s angry, it’s untrusting—it’s his father. She didn’t stay long enough for her to see Billy turn into this ugly, angry parasite.

When he thinks about the night at Jonathan Byers’s house, Billy wonders if Steve and Max and those fucking little kids saw his father. But why would they? They only know Billy. They only _saw_ Billy. It was his hands, his mouth, his eyes—not his father’s—that fucked up Steve Harrington’s face, that cursed Steve Harrington and yelled at Max, _his_ eyes were full of anger and hatred.

How can he expect others to separate himself from his father when Billy isn’t even sure they’re not the same person.

He’s pretty like his mother but ugly like his father.

He did it because he was angry and he was powerless in front of his father; Billy just wanted to regain some _dignity_ in his father’s eyes. “Bring Max home”. That was his task. Steve Harrington was in the way, but it wasn’t supposed to happen like that. Billy’s good at escalating things. He can take his camaro from stagnant to zipping down the road at seventy-five miles an hour in seconds. He can get a girl eating out of his palm in seconds. Billy can go from sober to blackout _quick._

The fight with Steve Harrington was no different. It’s funny. The first time Billy saw Steve Harrington, he didn’t want to punch him at all. He wanted to stay the _fuck_ away from him. Steve Harrington would fuck up Billy’s resolve. And he did, but not in the way Billy thought he would.

After the night at Byers’s, Billy didn’t see Harrington until school reconvened after the holidays. First day of classes, Harrington sat in front of him in Biology. And then in English, he sat two seats to the right of Billy. At lunch, he sat with that Wheeler chick and her creepy boyfriend.

But his face was blemish free. No bruises, no cuts.

It was like Billy was never there.

He doesn’t know why that bothers him.

A week into classes, in Biology Steve Harrington is doing a horrible job of pretending to pay attention to Mrs. Lanningham. His head is slumped on his fist, his eyes are closed. And when she calls on him to answer a question, he doesn’t even rouse from his sleep.

“Mr. Harrington?”

Harrington doesn’t move. Billy kicks his legs and when Harrington face slips off his fist he stares at Mrs. Lanningham staring at him.

“Sorry, what?”

“I asked you: which area of the brain are odours interpreted?”

Harrington gapes. He doesn’t know. It’s the fucking cerebrum. He stutters, “It’s the uh—the part of the brain that interprets odours is the uh—”

Billy coughs and mutters: “Cerebrum” under his breath, quiet enough that Mrs. Lanningham’s hard of hearing ears won’t catch.

“—cerebrum,” Harrington finishes.

Mrs. Lanningham swallows and stares at Harrington for a moment before she slides her gaze over the classroom and moves on to discuss what happens when chemicals interact with odour-receptors. Billy tunes out. After a minute, Harrington turns back in his seat to face Billy. He looks up from his doodle of a dog riding a motorcycle to Harrington’s face. He didn’t see him earlier. Didn’t look. But Harrington’s got awful eye bags, and his eyes are glassy—he looks fucking tired.

He runs his hands through his hair and says to Billy, “Thanks for the save.”

This is new territory. These words don’t have an underlying bite to them. They’re not gonna stare each other down and pound theirs fists in to each other. Billy almost chokes on his reply.

“It was no problem.”

And that was that. Harrington nods and turns back in his seat and ten minutes later, he falls asleep until the bell rings. 

**Author's Note:**

> As much as this is a story about Billy and Steve, it's also about Billy and his father.


End file.
